on loneliness

I had a major breakthrough. Actually two. The first one was that I managed to watch a video via RTMP using Swfdec (Yahoo music and BBC use that). That got me really excited so I went to our IRC channel to tell people. This was when I had the second major breakthrough.

I relaized at that moment that there was noone anywhere that wanted to share my happiness. Noone saying “congrats”, let alone asking “How did you do that?”. I realized I’m a lonely hacker these days.

This got me wondering why I’m still working on Swfdec, and the answer was that I don’t know. Originally it started because I wanted to watch Youtube with free software. I’m able to do this for almost 2 years now. Then it was exciting to figure out how Flash worked and how hard it’d be to write a Free player. I know pretty much everything I want to know about Flash today. The last year I’ve worked on Swfdec because other people were interested in it. But those people went away to do other things and these days I’m the only one left working on it. And as I mentioned above, that’s not fun.

So I’m going to change something. I’m not sure what it will be, but it’s equally likely that I continue working on Swfdec as it is that I’m gonna do something else entirely. We’ll see. If you know something You’d like me doing, mail me. :)

51 comments ↓

> So I’m going to change something. I’m not sure what
> it will be, but it’s equally likely that I continue
> working on Swfdec as it is that I’m gonna do
> something else entirely. We’ll see. If you know
> something You’d like me doing, mail me. :)

Maybe it need some fundings and/or more hackers to keep going. If I could suggest something, annotate the internals of the source code more, to keep your good knowledge of Flash inheritable by later hackers. I might be one, and I hope swfdec could keeping going, even slowly, but better than dead.